


Trust for the Untrusted

by Nickidemus



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Werewolf Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 10:46:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1185331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nickidemus/pseuds/Nickidemus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Huntsmen and Red Riding Hood meet, finding they have a lot in common.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trust for the Untrusted

She saw him, her eyes glowing gold with readiness should he turn on her. Her eyes were especially glued to that long knife with steam rising from the red stain upon it. It was a deer he'd felled, but she didn't trust she could simply speak aloud and not find that knife stuck in her. He was a huntsman, and she'd heard such tales as to know they'd do anything for a price.

Then she saw him do a peculiar thing. He knelt and pressed a hand to the wound he'd made and said a few words to thank the beast for its sacrifice. Her heart warmed, her eyes cooled, and she stepped from behind the tree.

His head raised in a sudden jerk as he spun on her. "Who are you?"

"Red," she answered simply.

He was coming down off of that unpleasant surprise, wide-eyed as he said, "it is very rare that anyone could startle me out here. I know these woods as one knows their home, every sounds it makes, every creak and moan."

She looked down at her feet, then back up at him. "I should not have frightened you." Or spoken to you at all. "I'll leave you then."

"Wait." He'd sensed something in her and wouldn't be satisfied until he'd gotten to its source, its answer. "Do you need help? Are you lost? There are no cottages nearby that I know of. Can I help you?"

"I was always of a mind that young women shouldn't talk to strangers," she smirked. "You never know what beast lurks inside men."

He furrowed his brow, smiling slightly at the playful way she spoke. "You are different."

"So are you."

Then he asked the question that had been on his mind since she'd appeared. "How long have you been watching me?"

She pinched her lips together and decided then to reply honestly. Because she kept thinking of that deer, dead and somehow honored. "I've been tracking you. You're a hunter. A skilled one. I needed to know you weren't... after me."

His eyes narrowed. "Unlike some, I do not hunt young women."

"It's been done before," she said with a tilt of her head. "And if you're worth even half a damn, you've already guessed I'm not what I seem."

He couldn't say what it was that made this true. He only knew that it was true without a doubt. "You belong to this wood as much as I do." That seemed a good start. "The way you move... I didn't hear you because you have the same... skill. Somehow. I'm not saying this right."

"But we can't possibly be the same," she pointed out.

"This would help if I knew what you were," he laughed.

"Then you'd kill me."

He appeared sad at that. The only huntsman she'd ever met who seemed to hate death. "If I swore not to?"

She sighed, burning now to tell him, feeling something between them that surely made it all right. "I'm a wolf. By light of the moon usually, but I am learning to control it. If that makes any sort of difference."

She thought his breathlessness was from fear, but she soon saw it was some eagerness that was upon him. "A wolf? Truly?"

"Yes, I..." She was at a loss, beginning to have reservations, kicking herself inside for speaking to him at all, trying to back away.

"I am a brother to wolves," he told her quickly, staying her with a raised hand. "I could never harm one for the kinship I feel to them. You are in safe hands, my lady, I swear it."

Her heart gave a flip, and a smile touched her face.

He finished cutting up the deer, and she helped him gather tinder to cook a meal. With the fire keeping light and warmth close, they stayed near and talking well into the night, finding conversation so easy, which was especially exciting for the huntsman who found no one seemed to understand him, nor did they want to.

The moon rose high and fat and glowing, and Red craned her neck to see it. Gazing upon him once more, she asked, "do you wish to see?"

His answer was so clear and without hesitation that she couldn't deny him even if her own question sent a tremor of fear through her: "I want nothing more in this world."

So she untied her red hood from her throat, letting it puddle to the ground behind her. The change took her, and it was no longer painful as it had been. She embraced it, which precluded agony for her craving it. Her eyes went first, as they always did, and then the rest of her twisting and forming a new animal, something part of herself and part beast and neither for being both.

He was wary but too fascinated to resist reaching his hand out. She snarled with one corner of her mouth, because part of her would always be wild, but she nuzzled into his outstretched palm with her golden eyes sliding shut. Then she was licking gently along his arm, then the side of his neck as his fingers buried in her ruff. Then his face.

The moon took them, brought its magic not only to Red, but to her hunter, as well. A woman who embodied both the allure of a woman and of nature that he so worshiped. It felt bright, as red as her hood, as golden as her eyes, as effervescent as the moon, and he let it take him. Despite her animal form, he took her as a man in love, feeling her ferocious teeth against him, her tongue, as he plunged. He murmured her name in her pointed ear, her replies feral and impassioned.

She came with a long, needful howl, feeling him drive his seed into her, not knowing what that might do and not caring. He lay with her, warmed by her fur as the fire began to die. Then she felt her cloak being brought over her shoulders, and they lay skin-to-skin under the stars, barely visible beneath the cover of crossing branches overhead.

"I never imagined being so accepted that what we just did could be possible," she whispered in the dark.

"I've heard it said that anything is possible with true love."

She snuggled against him more fully, not wanting to say she'd given up on having a true love of her own. Until now.


End file.
